The Dead Sea Scroll Controversy

Inside Higher Ed is reporting that the case of Raphael Golb has taken a strange turn. As you remember, Raphael Golb impersonated several individuals to promote his father’s view on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As I wrote in a previous post:

According to a news release put out by the New York County District Attorney’s office, Raphael Haim Golb was arrested today on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment. Gold is the son of Norman Golb, a professor at the University of Chicago and a specialist in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

According to the news release, Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau announced that Golb was arrested for creating multiple aliases in order to engage in a campaign of impersonation and harassment against scholars who opposed his father’s views on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

According to the article in Inside Higher Ed, “court documents point to evidence suggesting that Norman Golb, his wife, Ruth, and their other son, Joel, were aware of the alias-based campaign and may have assisted in carrying it out.”

The following is an excerpt from the article:

In the latest twist of a curious legal case involving allegations of identity theft, cyber-bullying, and two-millennia-old religious artifacts, a well-known University of Chicago professor has been implicated in a complex, Internet-based scheme to smear opponents of his work. Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at Chicago, has been mostly a sideline figure since his son, Raphael, was arrested last March after allegedly creating dozens of Web aliases and using them to harass and discredit scholars who disagree with his father’s theories about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But new court documents point to evidence suggesting that Norman Golb, his wife, Ruth, and their other son, Joel, were aware of the alias-based campaign and may have assisted in carrying it out. Raphael Golb stands accused of harassing various scholars who do not believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls originated in Jerusalem — a theory Norman Golb advocated in a 1995 book. The new documents, released last month, purport to show transcripts of e-mails exchanges among members of the Golb family indicating coordinated efforts to advance Norman Golb’s theories though Web aliases. They also include sharp criticisms of Schiffman, which the prosecution is trying to use as evidence of motive and intent for the identity theft — the only felony charge against Raphael Golb. The evidence was released to the court after the defense moved to suppress it. Norman Golb could not be reached for comment.

Read the article in Inside Higher Ed in its entirety for the links to the relevant court documents.

HT: Jim Davila

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

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Tags: Dead Sea Scrolls, Norman Golb, Raphael Golb

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World

The Jewish Museum in New York is presenting an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls titled: “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World.” The exhibit runs through January 4 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave, New York.

Contrary to previous exhibits, this one focus on the controversy raging among scholars on the provenance and authorship of the scrolls. According to an article published by The Jewish Week, the exhibit presents Roland de Vaux’s view that the scrolls belonged to the Essenes, a monastic Jewish sect who lived at Qumran.

The exhibit also presents the views of Norman Golb, that the scrolls belonged to Jerusalem Jews escaping a Roman attack.

The Jewish Museum has made an effort at presenting both sides of the controversy. Susan L. Braunstein, the exhibit’s curator, said that “It’s not the moment to say which is the most believable or correct. We don’t have enough of the archaeological evidence published; there’s no smoking gun.”

The article gives a ray of hope that may solve the controversy. Until now, some of de Vaux’s field notes from his excavations at the Qumran remain unpublished. Some scholars believe that these notes may vindicate the new theories about the scrolls.

The article reports that Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the successor to de Vaux, has announced that the third volume of de Vaux’s field notes from his excavations will be published within the next three months and the fourth and final volume will be published within a year after that.

The article in The Jewish Week is excellent and presents a balanced view of both side of the debates. Read the article by clicking here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, Norman Golb, Roland de Vaux

Norman Golb on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Professor Norman Golb has written another article on the ongoing Dead Sea Scrolls controversy. The article is available in PDF format on the website of the Oriental Institute at theUniversity of Chicago.

The following is an excerpt taken from the article:

FACT AND FICTION IN CURRENT EXHIBITIONS OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Six decades after their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls are still being treated in many quarters as merely the writings of a small sect that once inhabited an austere desert location near the area where they were discovered. Nowhere is this effort being more ardently pursued than in the present series of Scroll exhibitions taking place here in the States.

This series, while rooted in showings of previous decades, was developed and formulated only during the past few years, beginning with the exhibit that took place in Charlotte (N.C.) in the spring of 2006. This one was passed on to Seattle’s Pacific Science Center (Autumn 2006). From there it traveled to Kansas City’s Discovery Place (Winter and Spring 2007), and it is now moving to San Diego’s Natural History Museum, with an opening planned for the end of June
2007.

It must be noted that the wording of the descriptions in the exhibit plaques has been formulated in consultation with and subject to the approval of the responsible curators at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem.

While variations in wording can be found in each of the exhibitions, the basic idiom and associated message remain the same: they have in common an effort to convince the public of the truth of the old theory, created in the infancy of Scroll scholarship, that these manuscripts were written in whole or at least in large part by a Jewish sect of Essenes supposedly living at a site — Khirbet Qumran — located in the Judaean Wilderness near the Dead Sea shore.

These claims contradict the presently known accumulation of evidence, adduced by growing numbers of text scholars and archaeologists, demonstrating that the Scrolls are of Jerusalem origin, that Khirbet Qumran was a secular site with no connection to a religious sect, and that the Scrolls lack any organic relation to that site.


Read the whole article by clicking here.

The debate about the nature of the Qumran community continues. This article raises important issues that needs to be evaluated by those who are interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Dead Sea Scrolls, Norman Golb

The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Controversy Continues

People who are interested in the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls know that there is a controversy among scholars on the nature and origin of the Scrolls.

The traditional view about the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they are the work of the Essenes or an Essene-like sect that lived at Khirbet Qumran, a site located near the shore of the Dead Sea in the Judean Wilderness. The traditional view also claims that the Essenes wrote their sectarian books and copied biblical texts and then, at the time Rome was threatening the community, hid the Scrolls in the eleven caves in which they were discovered in the 1950s and 1960s.

The alternative theory is best explained by Norman Golb:

“The Scrolls reflect religious and social ideas of various groups within ancient Judaism, that Khirbet Qumran was not a religious site either of Essenes or others, and that the hiding of the Scrolls in the caves arose out of the need of the Jews of Jerusalem, circa 68/69 C.E., to sequester their manuscripts and other valued possessions when they became aware that the Romans intended to besiege and invade the city.”

This description of the alternative theory is presented by Golb in a lengthy article, “The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center” and published on the web page of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Golb’s article was written in reaction to the exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Golb believes the exhibit is designed to support the original Qumran-Sectarian theory. He came to this conclusion based on the fact that the exhibit excludes any information that supports the alternative view.

Readers who are interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and learning the reasons for the alternative theory will profit from reading Golb’s article. At the end of his article, Golb provides a list of books and articles that oppose the traditional theory of the origin and nature of the Scrolls. I highly recommend this article.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Qumran, Essenes, Dead Sea Scrolls, Norman Golb

Toilets, Qumran, and the Essenes

In an article written by Alan Boyle, Science Editor for MSNBC, Israeli anthropologist Joe Zias and James Tabor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte report the discovery of latrines at Qumran. Below is an excerpt of the article:

One of the less sanitary aspects of life in Jesus' day has come into play in the debate over who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, how they lived and how they died.

The latest evidence comes from a site that two researchers have identified as the communal latrine for Qumran, the ancient settlement near the caves where the 2,000-year-old scrolls were found.

Israeli anthropologist Joe Zias and James Tabor, a biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, say the unusual placement of the latrine would be consistent with the theory that Qumran was inhabited by a hard-core Jewish sect known as the Essenes. They even speculate that the latrine's unsanitary conditions may have contributed to ill health among the sect's members.

The prevailing view among archaeologists has been that Essenes at a Qumran monastery were the keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls — but that view has come under increasing challenge in recent years, with some experts saying Qumran was a fortress or a pottery-making center that had nothing to do with the Essenes.

One of the most vigorous critics of the Essene connection, University of Chicago historian Norman Golb, told MSNBC.com that the latest report from Tabor and Zias "does nothing" to prove that the Essenes lived and worked in Qumran.

"The recent finding of a latrine can, at the most, show no more than that the inhabitants of the area were human beings who practiced some form of sanitation," Golb said.

So what do ancient potty practices have to do with the mystery of Qumran? Although the findings of Zias and Tabor may not be a smoking gun, they represent an intriguing blend of textual analysis and "CSI"-style forensics — intriguing enough to be accepted for publication in Revue de Qumran, an international journal on Dead Sea Scroll science.

Toiletries in texts

It all started with Tabor's reflection on historical texts: The book of Deuteronomy, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, considered bathroom duties to be unclean in the sight of God. Thus, the faithful were told that their latrines had to be placed far enough away from the community to be out of sight. Various references specify distances of 1,000 to 3,000 cubits (1,500 to 4,500 feet, or 457 to 1,370 meters), preferably to the northwest of the community.

According to the 1st-century historian Josephus, the Essenes in Jerusalem strictly observed this custom. He marveled at the Essenes' religious and intestinal fortitude, noting that they refused to "go to stool" on the Sabbath — and Tabor speculated that this was because the latrine was farther away than Jews were allowed to travel on the holy day.

Years ago, it struck Tabor that Essenes at Qumran should have had a similar practice. "I thought, 'They must have been doing this if they believed it so fervently. Has anyone ever gone out and looked for this?'" he recalled.

Looking at a map, Tabor saw there was a prime site about 1,640 feet (500 meters) northwest of the Qumran site, sheltered from view behind a bluff. When he walked up to the site, he could see that one area of soil had a significantly different coloration. But how could he prove that it was a latrine, where the Essenes felt it was their religious duty to dig a trench, do their business and shovel dirt back on top?

That's when Tabor called upon Zias, a "bioarchaeologist" who has taken on other biblical puzzles such as the mechanics behind Roman-style crucifixion.

Parasites in ancient poop?

Zias took 10 soil samples — four from the site identified by Tabor, and six from elsewhere in the area as control samples — and had them analyzed by Stephainie Harter-Lailheugue, a French parasitologist from the Centre National de la Recerche Scientifique.

Three of the four samples from the suspected latrine contained desiccated eggs from parasitic worms commonly found in human stool samples (tapeworms, roundworms and pinworms). Meanwhile, none of the control samples turned up evidence of human-specific parasites.

Zias said that would indicate "heavy and continual use" of the site as a latrine.

Usually, the parasites in fecal matter would die out due to exposure to the elements in the Dead Sea region, Zias said. That's what happens to the waste left behind by modern-day Bedouins, for example. But Zias said the Essenes' practice of covering up their waste may have actually preserved the parasites.

Yet another curious twist strengthened the Qumran connection: Similar traces of parasites were found in a soil sample taken from inside the settlement, at a spot that Zias and Tabor think served as an emergency restroom for the Essenes.

As he put together the story, Zias came around to the view that Qumran was actually a pretty unsanitary place to live. "This should be a warning to religious people that you can take things a little bit too far," he told MSNBC.com.

Godliness vs. cleanliness

As time went on, pathogens would likely build up in the latrine, Zias said.

"What happened was that 20 to 40 people went out there every day over a period of 100 years," he explained in a University of North Carolina news release. "By burying their fecal matter, they actually preserved the microorganisms and parasites. In the sunlight, the bacteria and parasites get zapped within a fairly short amount of time, but buried, the parasites can live in the soil for up to a year. Then people pick up things by walking through fecally contaminated soil — it's like a toxic waste dump, and if you have any cuts on your feet..."

If the people who used the latrines were indeed Essenes, their religious practice would require them to undergo a ritual washing when they returned to the settlement. For modern-day Westerners, that sounds like good hygiene. But 1st-century Qumran was a different environment, and such practices would actually make matters worse, Zias said.

Water would typically stand in the ritual pools for months at a time, replenished only by three months' worth of winter rains. When the residents immersed themselves in the pools, they'd leave behind bacteria and parasite eggs. The warm water and sediment would serve as a fertile breeding ground for the pathogens, leading to cross-infection.

"Can you see yourself going into whirlpool water standing there for nine months, and 100 people have been going in there before you, day in and day out?" he asked.

Zias said the parasites detected at the presumed latrine would cause intestinal distress — which, in his mind, also helps explain the emergency toilet identified within the community. "If you're sitting there reading the Torah and you've got diarrhea, you think you're going to make it up the hill? You're not going to make it," he said.

To read the article in its entirety, visit the MSNBC Web page by clicking here.

The article presents more details about the findings by Zias and Tabor. The article also sheds additional light on the lives of the people who lived and worked at Qumran.

If you are interested in one aspect of at life Qumran and how the Essenes lived, this is an article that you should read.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old TestamentT
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Qumran, Essenes, Joe Zias, James Tabor,Norman Golb